Rights

Late Thursday, the White House released via Twitter President Obama's annual statement commemorating the anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade. As he has in severalpreviousstatements, the president cast the decision as critical in "ensuring that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms and opportunities as our sons."

This year, the president also made a point to single out H.R. 7, the bill passed by the House today that would permanently ban federal funding for abortions as "intrusive" and "unnecessarily restrictive" on women's rights.

Forty-two years ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Roe v. Wade, a decision that protects a woman’s freedom to make her own choices about her body and her health, and reaffirms a fundamental American value: that government should not intrude in our most private and personal family matters.

I am deeply committed to protecting this core constitutional right, and I believe that efforts like H.R. 7, the bill the House considered today, would intrude on women's reproductive freedom and access to health care and unnecessarily restrict the private insurance choices that consumers have today. The federal government should not be injecting itself into decisions best made between women, their families, and their doctors. I am also deeply committed to continuing our work to reduce unintended pregnancies, support maternal and child health, promote adoptions, and minimize the need for abortion.

Today, as we reflect on this critical moment in our history, may we all rededicate ourselves to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as our sons.

On this 42nd anniversary, the annual March for Life is also taking place in Washington.

'It’s not even close.'

Former New York City mayor is pledging to spend $50 million this year to push gun control, the New York Times reports. For this and other deeds (such as taking on obesity and smoking), Bloomberg believes he's going to heaven.

Senator Ted Cruz has organized an effort to urge President Barack Obama to help free Pastor Saeed Abedini, an American pastor imprisoned in Iran.

“The President of the United States is in a unique position to focus international attention on the unjust and abusive detention of one of our citizens,” Cruz says in a press release. “There might also be an opportunity for administration officials participating in nuclear negotiations in Geneva this week to raise the issue directly with their Iranian counterparts. Time is of the essence given Pastor Saeed's current predicament.”

President Barack Obama will use tonight's State of the Union Address to announce a group that will explore ways to improve "the Election Day experience." The Huffington Post, which broke the news, calls the group "a bipartisan presidential voting commission."

It was inevitable that after the massacre in a Colorado movie theater, the matter of gun control would come up and that the president would weigh in on the subject. And, according to this report by Michael A. Memoli in the Los Angeles Times, he has:

Markos Moulitsas is wrong on the Internet.

It's understandable if you who haven't jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, but please know that it's good for one thing. The conversational, off-the-cuff nature of medium is very good at exposing the limits of one's knowledge. Case in point: Here's Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas reacting to Rick Santorum's speech tonight. Apparently some truths aren't as self-evident as they once were:

This story got a bit lost in the shuffle yesterday, but unions just suffered a big blow in Michigan. Now that the state is controlled by a Republican governor, they just put a stop to one of the most egregious examples of union overreach in the country.